Pastor John Hagee's D.C. Meeting Worries Jews
Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Thursday, May 17, 2007

Pastor John Hagee says Armageddon will soon strike the nation of Israel, so he's enlisting Christians to help protect Israel against an attack from Iran.

Hagee, who has close ties to the Bush administration, has some in the Jewish community worried about his efforts to help Israel and his talk of a coming war with Iran.

The well-known pastor and author, who broadcasts nationwide from his mega Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, has been seeking to help Jewish groups raise money from Christians for Israel.

"The enemies of Israel are the enemies of America," Hagee said. "They are the enemies of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. These enemies have drawn the battle line. If a line has to be drawn – then draw that line around both Christians and Jews! We are one; we are united!"

Such polemics from Hagee hail the fiery theme of the 2nd Annual Israel/Washington D.C. Summit slated for July 16-19 in the nation's capital.

As a warm up to the main July enclave, Washington area residents can attend a "Night to Honor Israel" in nearby Alexandria, Va., on May 20, also sponsored by Hagee.

Hagee, an unapologetic Christian Zionist, has hosted "Nights to Honor Israel" dinners in over 40 cities around the country – with help from a dedicated all-volunteer staff of 13 regional directors, 46 state directors and more than 85 city directors.

The most profitable evening, held last October in Hagee's hometown of San Antonio, snared some $7 million.

Funds flow directly into the coffers of various Jewish federations. This past summer, for instance, $1 million was donated to the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston for the Israel Emergency Campaign – an effort to aid the embattled northern region of Israel.

Fundamentalist Christians like Hagee believe they have a Biblical injunction to bless Jews and the State of Israel as God's "chosen people."

Hagee's efforts appear innocuous enough on its face, but some Jewish groups see his Christian Zionist movement with either skepticism or anger.

At the heart of the movement is Hagee's Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Founded in February 2006, this Christian, pro-Israel lobbying group is hard at work extending Hagee's influence beyond Washington – to Jewish and evangelical communities around the nation.

For his part, Hagee does not minimize the scope of his movement, stating that CUFI "will have organized offices in every state in the union, mobilizing every Christian and whoever will work with us on a pro-Israeli agenda."

Movement Stirs Uneasiness

Some critics, however, decry that Hagee's biblically based views on Israel do not serve the Jewish state.

Hagee's bestselling book, "Jerusalem Countdown," for instance, argues that Biblical interpretation reveals that Iran will lead a coalition of Islamic countries, also supported by Russia, in a nuclear attack on Israel. The event Hagee says will kick-off the real mother of all battles – Armageddon, the final great earthly war first mentioned in the Book of Revelation.

According to Hagee, this war between "Islamo-fascists" and the Christians and Jews has already begun and will over its course consume countless Israeli lives.

Not exactly a happy prospect for the Jewish state or an idea Judaism itself endorses.

But there's more unsettling stuff beneath the surface.

Hagee's strict interpretation of the Bible includes the belief that all of Israel and the Palestinian territories was promised by God to the Jews.

Some more dovish and liberal Jewish groups disagree with this view, and say it leaves very little room to negotiate for peace by, perhaps, withdrawing from the West Bank in exchange for a peace accord.

"I don't like that they would not like to see Israel trade land for peace, because in my view that's a very important formula," Rabbi Jonathan Biatch of Temple Beth El in Madison, Wis. says. "The real bottom line is the fact that this organization would like to exacerbate tensions in the Middle East so it will lead to Armageddon."

"To get in bed with the hard Christian right on Israel is a dangerous path," says Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Progressive Jewish Alliance. "This is a hard-driving, extremely smart and successful movement to essentially recast the U.S. as a Christian nation, and if Jews don't think that empowering that group in American foreign policy isn't part and parcel of empowering that group on domestic policy, they're wrong."

Hagee's fundamentalist is at odds with more secular and liberal Jews in the U.S. Hagee opposes gay marriage, abortion and immigration.

But not everyone is a Hagee skeptic.

"If you search through Jewish stories around the U.S., a lot of us have pieces of personal memory where non-Jews were there for us – not because they had a hidden agenda, but because they believed it was the right thing to do," says Michal Kohane, executive director of the Jewish Federation of the Sacramento Region. "There is a strong aspect of CUFI in which they are the descendants of that ideological concept."

Pushing for Armageddon

Still, Hagee's critics say he is not simply wants God's plan – as he sees it – to unfold, but to take an active role in seeing it happen.

At a July 19, 2006 CUFI event in Washington D.C., Hagee told the audience, "The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and the West ... a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation [...] and [the] Second Coming of Christ."

Some leading Jewish organizations take Hagee quite seriously.

For one thing, there was Hagee's speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in March, an event widely covered in the media.

For more than half a century, AIPAC has worked to help make Israel more secure by ensuring that American support remains strong. From a small public affairs boutique in the 1950s, AIPAC has grown into a 100,000-member national grassroots movement described by The New York Times as "the most important organization affecting America's relationship with Israel," notes the AIPAC web site.

"[That rhetorical coup at AIPAC] gave Hagee and his group legitimacy that maybe they didn't have before in our community," Rabbi James Rudin, a specialist in interfaith relations for the American Jewish Committee, recently told New York Jewish Week.

Rudin adds that Jewish leaders increasingly are willing to disregard the apocalyptic views of Christian Zionists like Hagee even when those views are expressed through political advocacy because "they are so focused on the tactical support he offers. There is a real disconnect; Jewish leaders mostly aren't aware of his apocalyptic claims."

Indeed, a New York Jewish Week survey of more than a dozen national and local Jewish leaders who have expressed opinions on the CUFI events showed that not a single one in the informal count had read one of Hagee's books – including his most recent, "Jerusalem Countdown."

But Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli journalist and author of "The End of Days," which documents the growing relationship between American Jews and pro-Israel evangelicals, recently told New York Jewish Week: "One could argue that people feel that you don't ask questions when people throw you a rope when you're drowning. But that's a misreading of Israel's situation. We're not drowning; we're not in that desperate a situation."

And Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, founder of JewsOnFirst, revealed to New York Jewish Week: "Many Christian Zionists share with the Nazis the paranoid idea that Jews and Judaism are the central actors in the world. And both seek the ultimate dismantling of Judaism and the Jewish faith – the Nazis through murder, the Christian Zionists through our ‘redemption.' Why would we cooperate in our own undoing? Why would we work with people who want us to disappear as a people?"

Despite all the rumblings and misgivings, however, the Hagee juggernaut rumbles on.

Hagee claims that he now has up to 50 million evangelicals keyed-up to the issue and on his side.

The board of Hagee's organization includes other prominent Christian conservatives, including the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and Gary Bauer, former president of the Family Research Council.

Among the key conference presenters in San Antonio last October, when more than 10,000 CUFI supporters gathered to work on their political platform and strategies, was former CIA director James Woolsey, a close supporter of AIPAC and outspoken opponent of the peace movement and of churches active in it.

At the July 19th, 2006 Washington D.C. inaugural event for CUFI a recorded warm greeting from George W. Bush was played to great fanfare.

At that gala session, four U.S. Senators and the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. were on hand to drink in the Hagee manifesto on Iran, Rapture, Tribulation, and the Second Coming."

After a recent meeting with Hagee in Texas, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., an announced candidate for the GOP nomination, said the two shared a common "commitment to the state of Israel."

McCain probably doesn't share the apocalyptic views of Rev. Hagee, who is predicting calamity, especially fire "‘upon those who live in security in the coastlands.'"

From this Biblical quote, Hagee concludes that there will be judgment upon all who stood by while the Russian-led force invaded Israel. "Could it be," he asks, "that America, who refuses to defend Israel from the Russian invasion, will experience nuclear warfare on our east and west coasts?"

He answers "Yes!" to his own rhetorical bombshell.

Hagee identifies as the Anti-Christ none other than the head of the European Union. According to Hagee, in the ramp-up to Armageddon, the EU chief will rule "a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion" for three and a half years.

The "demonic world leader" will then be confronted by a false prophet, identified by Hagee as China – at Armageddon, the Mount of Megiddo in Israel.

As they prepare for the final battle, Jesus will return on a white horse and cast both villains – and a host of nonbelievers, including Jewish nonbelievers – into a "lake of fire burning with brimstone."

The Rev. Donald Wagner, associate professor of religion and Middle Eastern studies at North Park University in Chicago and executive director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, has tried to put this view into perspective.

Warner, the author of "Anxious for Armageddon," argues that Christian Zionism as a biblical theory has been around in some shape or form since the 1600s.

However, Wagner suggests that most recently the movement has evolved into a new entity that links its literal and fundamentalist interpretation of the Christian Bible with a convergence of political and sociological trends at large in America.

Simmering in the potent brew, Wagner suggests, is a growth of a "fear factor" in the U.S. since 9/11 – fueled by the millennium and "End Times" prophecy, as well as intensely marketed Christian fiction such as the "Left Behind" series; and, finally, the rise of right-wing political conservatism.

The Bush administration's utterance about "the axis of evil" and its "Crusader" mindset, coupled with the neocons' fascination with empire has captured the minds of many Christians who were already buying into the End Times biblical interpretation.

Blended together, all these elements made for the perfect recipe for Christian Zionism, Wagner suggests.

The only question remaining: Will it all boil over and even impact the flavor of the 2008 Race?